The sainted Valentine

BY Judy Rumbold |
08 July 2007

It was the miracle no one thought possible: transforming Camilla Parker Bowles from dowdy to dazzling for her wedding day. Anna Valentine, now the duchess's favourite dressmaker, tells Judy Rumbold how she pulled it off

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Let's be honest: nobody was expecting Camilla Parker Bowles to look especially great on her wedding day. The country was not holding its breath.

Here, after all, was a terminally dowdy frump who had rarely betrayed the remotest whiff of clothes sense and had been viciously derided by Hollywood's self-appointed style arbiter Richard Blackwell as 'packing the stylistic punch of a dilapidated Yorkshire pudding'. The omens were not good.

For any designer faced with the challenge of dressing her in her role as new royal consort, the raw material was unpromising - the inelegant gait, the snaggle-toothed leer, the hopelessly retrograde flicked hairdo straight off a late-1970s dress pattern. How good could she have reasonably hoped to look when she married the heir to the throne in April two years ago?

In the event, she surprised us all. From the minute she appeared outside the Guildhall in Windsor, an explosion of Philip Treacy plumage dancing around her face, Camilla looked the picture of radiant understatement.

Her oyster silk basketweave coat and chiffon dress were greeted as an unmitigated triumph, and not just on home turf. In the hard-to-please ateliers of Paris, there were quiet murmurings of approval. 'Karl Lagerfeld said nice things. So did Azzedine Alaïa,' says Anna Valentine, the couturier who buffed up the bride to a dazzling shine.

The first questions that occur on entering Valentine's studio are almost exclusively puerile and unsuitable. Camilla Parker Bowles has stood here in her underwear. She has posed, for hours at a time, in front of this huge mirror, being prodded, critiqued and advised.

Faced with a less than forgiving reflection, is she in the habit of letting rip a torrent of teary, flabby-thighed self-hate, like the rest of us? Big pants or not? Dinner-lady arms - yes or no? What are her bad points, her hang-ups, her relationship with the classic fiftysomething blights of crêpey neck and knackered knees?

But it quickly becomes clear that the unflappable Valentine didn't get to be a royal couturier by disclosing the innermost knicker-drawer secrets of her clients, many of whom are royal, all of whom are unfathomably wealthy, and some of whom fly in from Japan and America just for a fitting.

Everything about the set-up is discreetly tasteful, from the white-painted 19th-century converted grain store tucked away down a Marylebone mews, to the delightfully scented interior, smelling, I am informed, of tomato leaf.

The softly lit studio is quiet and distinctly ecclesiastical, with its exposed brickwork, spartan concrete floor and suggestion of cloistered quietude. Valentine, who trained as a dancer and is no slouch in the deportment department, has a nun-like serenity about her, and I feel a modest genuflection is in order before embarking on a tour of the intricately wrought clothes that hang round the walls like vestments.

Anything loud - that's visual as well as aural - is unwelcome here. 'I would never veer towards a pink,' she says sagely. 'Unless it was a dusty or a nude-y pink.'

And if her clients - who are, let's face it, accustomed to being granted their every last whim - insist on puce? Valentine will try and steer them towards a more flattering shade. 'Or sometimes I just have to tell them to go elsewhere. But very, very nicely'.

Tact, diplomacy and the kind of deal-brokering skills rarely seen outside a Stormont summit are the attributes that have made Valentine a popular choice among women who like their clothes to whisper, not shriek, expense and quality.

But while cash and good breeding might buy them a nice cut - prices start at £3,500 - it doesn't inoculate them against the fundamental hang-ups most women have about their bodies.

In no particular order Valentine details the four big gripes. 'Hips, tops of arms, big busts and legs,' she says, crisply. But she never confronts a client with a blunt criticism. 'I have to be very sensitive. My job is to persuade them to make the most of their good points and disguise the bad ones.'

She is admirably patient, too, with a steady stream of brides-to-be. But aren't they nearly always meddlesome neurotics with yo-yoing weight and nightmarish mothers? 'I normally expect a bride to have a "moment", but I am always surprised [when they don't],' she says.

The secret, apparently, is to shower them with the kind of full-on attention normally reserved for newborn babies and risottos. It works every time. 'They very rarely throw wobblies.'

For her loyal client list - which includes Lady Sarah Chatto, Patti Palmer-Tomkinson and Sheherazade Goldsmith - she combines spot-on tailoring with fabrics that drape, skim and caress the body.

Old-school couture rigidity is not her way. 'If clothes are light, they look more modern, they make people feel better.'

She rhapsodises about double-faced white linen from Japan and the fabulous printed silks she found on a recent trip to Cambodia. She cares about a fabric's fluidity like you and I care about breathing and efficient bowel function.

She knew she had chosen just the right fabric for Camilla's wedding dress when, watching anxiously as the happy couple emerged from the Guildhall, the hem of her dress caught the breeze. 'I went, "Yesss! It moved!"'

Valentine started making clothes as a way of paying for dancing lessons, but a bad experience at a Starlight Express audition put her off a career on the stage. When she realised that she'd be expected not only to dance and roller-skate, but sing, too - all at the same time - she knew she was out of her depth.

Instead, she capitalised on her skills as a dressmaker, and went on a pattern-cutting course, where she met Antonia Robinson, a fellow student. Together, in a south London garage, they started making clothes for their friends as Robinson Valentine.

Their big breakthrough came in 1993, when they made Serena Linley's going-away outfit. A few years on, their lives started to diverge.

Robinson began to spend more time in Cornwall with her husband and two children, and in April last year Valentine, who is married to Jonathan Berger, an entertainment lawyer, bought out Robinson and took sole charge of the company.

Fashion journalists have always been rather sniffy about Valentine and what was once its exclusively Chelsea-set following, but, on the evidence of a new collection rich with modern detailing, this seems a little unfair.

She concedes that, with no regular catwalk showings at fashion week, no retail outlet or ready-to-wear collection, and with often prohibitive prices, it is difficult for couturiers to reach a wider audience. And yet if anyone can explode the notion of couture being only for a well-heeled, rarified elite, she is the person to do it.

Valentine is a walking testament to the way couture can work in a youthful, casual way. Today she is dressed in a black tunic over narrow trousers from her own collection, worn with a grey Marni T-shirt and inexpensive gold slingbacks from Zara. With a sharp elfin bob and smoky eye make-up, at 43 she cuts a thoroughly modern figure.

She is determined to give her label a contemporary edge, and rejects the outdated idea of couture as being all about gold chairs and obsequious cosseting. For a start, she flatly refuses to go down the bone-china route. All customers, however grand, are served tea in mugs, although she admits that, with a higher profile and bolstered income, those mugs have gone upmarket. (Three years ago they were bog-standard white ones from Peter Jones. Now they come from a tasteful French supplier.)

Valentine also has a wonderfully cavalier approach towards the fiendishly expensive materials she uses. She is a great believer in bunging her fabrics into the washing machine. 'It gives them a lovely tumbled look.' Blimey. Did Camilla's wedding dress get the Hotpoint treatment? 'Yes! Normal cycle!'

She's not always so laid-back. When the call came through from Clarence House 'it was panic! Help! Sleepless nights.' With only six weeks' notice there was no room for mistakes.

But she went ahead and made one anyway. With the blue dress Camilla chose for the blessing, the two women had hatched plans for a fine gold lace over-lay, but Valentine couldn't make it work.

How did that go down with the anxious bride? 'She's lovely. She was absolutely fine about it.' She was fine, too, about the time she ended up locked in the office loo when she arrived for her first fitting. Valentine squirms at the memory. 'The doorknob fell off.'

Ah, doorknobs. Prior to meeting her, I had read about Valentine's loathing for doorknobs, which seemed like a curious aversion. But not now. When you imprison a possible future queen in the ladies', a subsequent wariness of knobs is entirely understandable.

Since then Valentine has made outfits for countless official engagements, and is now established as one of the Duchess of Cornwall's favourite dressmakers.

Indeed, she has every reason to be thoroughly pleased with herself. When you are the person responsible (although not adequately credited) for transforming not just the wardrobe, but also, somehow, the wider public perception of someone as vilified as Camilla Parker Bowles, that counts as success.